PRESIDENTIAL RIGHTS MUST BE PROTECT, TOO

When Rep. Dick Cheney, R-Wyo., said the other day that a principal objective of all investigations of the Iran arms sales affair should be protecting the power and privilege of the president, it seemed at first an odd assertion. But after what happened last week, I think Cheney, who served as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford before starting his own congressional career, may be exactly right.

Cheney was disturbed, as others were, by the news that congressional investigators were interested in taking a look at anything in the president's personal notes pertaining to his administration's dealings with the Ayatollah Khomeini. The notes are being kept by Reagan for the day when he writes his memoirs of the presidency, and it is not clear under the law whether congressional investigators have a right to acquire them, no matter what their relevance to the case at hand.

MANY FEARED SETTING PRECEDENT

The Supreme Court ruled in 1974 that President Nixon had to turn over the Watergate tapes to the special prosecutor weighing criminal charges against various White House officials. Many of us who were not the least sympathetic to Nixon worried that the unique necessity to deal with a president's effort to cover up criminal actions by his aides would set a precedent that would come back to haunt another chief executive.

It turns out that Reagan is the man. Almost as soon as the question was raised with the White House about the availability of Reagan's memoir notes, he cut short his aides' discussion of the finer points of the law, and said "relevant excerpts" of his notes would be made available to investigators.

Cheney's reaction was that this may have been good public relations but that ultimately "trashing" the procedures that protect the confidentiality of presidential communications serves no one's interest. "I'm worried," Cheney said, "that no one in the White House is concerned about the next president and his prerogatives." After this Reagan retreat, there is good reason to worry.

The tendency most of us have is to praise Reagan's candor in agreeing so readily to cooperate with the investigations. But think for a moment what is involved here.

REAGAN YIELDS POINT NIXON FOUGHT

No one has brought charges of criminality against Ronald Reagan; no one has suggested that he is about to take over the old Nixon role of the unindicted co-conspirator.

But Reagan is yielding a point that the guilty Nixon fought to the end. These notes that the investigators covet are not the policy papers that led up to the dumb decision to sell arms to Iran. They are the president's personal musings on his Middle East policy, intended only as a jog to his memory when he comes to write of what he was saying, doing and thinking at the time.

If such notes are not personal, privileged and protected, then surely not one scrap of paper produced in the White House decision-making process can be kept from the scrutiny of curious congressmen or special prosecutors.

Will they next be talking about subpoenaing presidential doodles and turning them over to a psychiatrist for analysis?

This is the kind of price that is paid when a president embarks on the course of secretive policy making. That cult of secrecy always in the end entraps the person who lets it get out of control.

In Reagan's case, the fatal moment came when he signed off on the silly scheme to sell arms to Iran. It was such a dubious proposition it had to be conducted by crooked and lying arms traders, shady retired government officials and military officers, and ego-tripping junior White House staff members. From the beginning the president seems to have realized it was so implausible a policy that it had to be kept secret from Congress -- statute and precedent to the contrary notwithstanding.

Now see what has happened. A president who did not take time to make the case for his policy to Congress and the country in advance sees his retroactive rationale rejected as a face-saving fiction.

Desperate to reclaim a degree of his damaged credibility, he makes foolish concessions to the investigators which he would never consider had not his political position been so damaged by his previous hyper-secrecy.

In doing so, as Cheney says, he weakens his own office and authority, thereby compounding the problem from which he is trying to escape.

And that is why, paradoxically enough, protection of the presidency has to be -- as Cheney says -- a major goal of the investigation of this particular president.